Pension counseling

Imagine earning a pension after many years of hard work with a company. Then you leave your employer before retiring and without claiming your pension. When you reach retirement age, you expect to be able to start receiving that pension but you are unable to find the employer or the plan. Your pension plan is “lost”.

Maureen contacted the Mid-America Pension Rights Project with a unique issue. Upon her husband’s death in 2005, she was told that she wasn’t entitled to a share of his pension because the plan had no record that her husband was married.

When Emma, a widow living in a nursing home, suddenly stopped receiving her monthly pension payments in May 2013, she turned to Lily, her granddaughter, for help. Emma had been receiving a survivor pension since her husband’s death in 1959 and didn’t know why her monthly pension payments had stopped.

When Carol Cascio’s husband suddenly died of a heart attack at age 52, her husband's pension plan told her that she would receive a survivor’s benefit in three years, when her husband would have been eligible for early retirement had he lived. The benefit would be based on the pension her husband had earned during his 33 years of work at a local supermarket.

Many who are planning their retirement need someplace to start — a list to begin their thinking. The information in this article is just such a list and includes links to relevant content to help in this planning.

PensionHelp America connects people who need help with their pension, 401(k), and other retirement plans with the pension counseling projects, legal services providers, and government agencies that can help answer their questions. Visit www.pensionhelp.org.

Did You Know?

A lump-sum distribution is a method of paying benefits from a pension plan in which a participant's entire beenfit is paid out in a one-time payment. Lump sum distributions are sometimes called cash outs.